This is a topic hot on the agenda (pardon the pun) of world governments at present. Indeed, I was in Malaysia last week to give the plenary address at the inaugural Asia Pacific Health Ministers’ Conference On Climate Change and Health. These folks are taking this issue extremely seriously — the Asia-Pacific region stands to lose plenty from even the amount of committed warming and associated impacts we have in the pipeline, let along a future of near-unmitigated emissions for decades to come.

In short, if environmental concerns continue to be neglected in the short-term myopic pursuit of ‘growth at all costs’, then a future world will inevitably be a far nastier, more hostile and less biologically rich one in which to live.

By this, I should clarify, I mean ‘development’ that is predicated on the back of exponentially growing depletion or degradation of natural capital (ecosystems, soils, ground water, oceans, etc.) and ‘hard’ resources (coal, oil, gas, tar sands, oil shales, mineral phosphate, etc.) – the kind Malthus and the Club of Rome saw as unsustainable. Clever, tech savvy growth (renewable energy, computer power and virtual worlds, information exchange, knowledge services, etc.), on the other hand, is potentially nearly limitless (well, things get difficult to predict once you’ve moved beyond Dyson Spheres).

Reiter is focused on malarial spread – the issue of human health is much wider than that. His position is also not supported by the larger majority of health experts working on climate change – it is a similar dissenter vs consensus to the physical science issue.

I guess it’s still a question if they found him or he found them (the “think-tanks”). He was pretty angry with the IPCC so I can see how he might be easily motivated to “join up”. Has anyone countered his views on malaria and climate?

No one disagrees with Reiter that the geographical range of Plasmodium, or other tropical blood parasites and arboviruses, is constrained by more than just climate. But Reiter takes a very narrow view – that because malarial distribution is controlled by multiple factors and its realised niche is narrower than its presumed fundamental niche, ergo additional temperature warming will be relatively unimportant in determining whether it spreads. But this is far too simplistic. Rainfall distribution and intensity and seasonal availability of standing water are just two further factors which control mosquito population distribution. Both will also be altered by climate change, including via sea level changes which will create more inundated coastal areas which provide prime mosquito breeding habitat. Hence the synergy of these factors is strongly suspected to increase the prevalence of tropical disease under global warming, especially in areas where contact with dense human populations is most regular.